Bedroom beautification – Night table makeover

The problem with renting a house while your house is staged and up for sale is that you don’t have a whole lot of furniture options. You don’t want to spend a lot of money buying new furniture when you’ll be reunited with your own furniture eventually. But the rental house furniture really isn’t your cup of tea, and you’ll be living with it for a year (or possibly two). So what do you do? You ask the person who owns your rental house how attached he is to the furniture in the house. And if you’re lucky, he’ll give you the go-ahead to do whatever you want with it. YAY!

The one room that has really been bugging me is the bedroom. Picture it -  white walls, white ceiling, boob light, mattress on the floor, a $45 dresser from Kijji, a ripped pull-down blind, and two burgundy melamine night tables. Got that image in your mind? Here, I’ll help you out – this is one of the beautiful burgundy night tables:

I guess it could be worse, but it could definitely be better! I wasn’t really sure how these night tables would end up, but I knew these babies were in need of a makeover.

I don’t have any chalk paint with me, and I had a bad experience with milk paint, so I decided to use a regular latex paint. As it turns out, Home Hardware sells a cabinet paint that just happens to be cheaper than their other latex paints. Sold! So this is the paint I used –  INSL-X Cabinet Coat.

The advantage to this paint over chalk & milk paint is that you can get it in any colour you want, and you don’t need to wax or oil it. When you’re done painting, you’re done your project. According to the label, it’s also self-priming on a number of surfaces, including melamine. But I primed anyway, just to be safe. I also gave the tables and drawers a sanding and filled the holes from the pulls with filler. I still don’t have pulls picked out , but I know the original pulls won’t be going back on.

 

 

Primer is primer, we can just skip seeing that step (OK, I forgot to take pictures). I started out painting the tables green, but when I put them back into the room, the green just didn’t do it for me. *Sigh*  Luckily I also bought a can of Simply White for another project, so used it to repaint the tables from green to white.

Ah, much better!

Hmmmm, how to snazz it up a bit. I hit Pinterest and found a couple of pictures that gave me an idea…

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I taped off stripes using the eyeball it method. I just pulled the tape right across the top of the table and down the drawer fronts, and then took out the drawers. I had to add extra tape to the tops and bottoms of the drawers, but no biggie. I didn’t want perfectly clean edges on the stripes, so I wasn’t concerned about preventing the paint from bleeding under the tape. (Normally I use this technique for painting clean lines.)

And then a quick coat of bluey-green paint that I mixed myself with paint that I had on hand. And yes, I did all this right in the bedroom next to the messy bed :-)

 

 

To do the numbers, I found a font that I liked, printed out No 3 and No 5 on regular paper, cut them out, and then traced them onto the drawers fronts. Then I painted them freehand. Again, not going for perfection :-)

Say hello to Table No 5 and Table No 3…

I just used one coat of paint and left the lines from the brush for a sort of linen effect.

 

They still need to be properly accessorized, but I didn’t want to leave them naked for their photo shoot ;-)

  

You might have noticed that there aren’t any pulls on the drawers. I’m undecided between using nautical knobs or boat cleats.
 

And if I use boat cleats, should I leave them silver or paint them a fun colour… If you have an opinion, let me know!

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From kinda blah in burgundy…

…to pretty nice in stripes :-)

    
 

 

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